Reads everything but the room

You're welcome to think Cohost's design is hostile to whatever you want to get out of social media but it's kind of dumb and, at the present juncture, fairly assholish to call the developers 'naive' by saying they should have built something more similar to some other social media platform that is also, at present, wildly unprofitable (they all are!)

Yeah the fact is that every social media platform is unprofitable right now. The only real exception is Meta, but they're not making money from social media per se

I think that even if you're not a right-winger there's a tendency to harbor some "get woke go broke" intuitions about Cohost, like they try too hard to be pure and they should have wallpapered the site with ads and they should have encouraged Skinner-box addiction dynamics and they should have promised not to moderate Free Speech and they should have sucked up to corporate sponsors and then they'd be as financially successful as...

Twitter or Tumblr?

well that's where that line of reasoning breaks down

There's an impressive trick right-wing ideas have played, where they define themselves as "tough but practical" and we are in such a rush to point out that "tough" is actually "evil" that we unconsciously concede the point on "practical"

This is so, extremely, ridiculously true, and it even pervades our historical lens on the most evil right-wing ideas in history. The idea that fascism is "brutally efficient" is great for thought experiments, narrative tension, and gameplay balance--with the drawback of being completely untrue.

"Societies must balance their needs between social justice and economic prosperity" has never actually been true, it's just a way to make resistance to social justice sound like something smart and complicated that Serious Grownups would do as a Reluctant Sacrifice.

Anyway. I don't know the future of Cohost but I do know that the typical user in here is much more committed to the success of the site, more personally aligned with its goals, than on any other social media I've used. I have vastly more hope in that getting us through--people are practically begging for more ways to give the site money--than I would if Cohost started running crypto ads and algorithmic outrage bait.

i like math a lot. and of the different kinds of mathematics that i have acquainted myself with, matroids are my favourite mathematical object, bar none. so i'd like to teach you what a matroid is, one chost at a time.

i will try to make this course accessible to as many as i can. however, matroid theory is a graduate level topic in combinatorics and touches many fields. so to get the most out of this course, you should have a basic understanding of linear algebra, and it wouldn't hurt to know a bit of introductory graph theory or combinatorics either. if there is demand for it, i can put together little appendices to get you up to speed on these topics—leave me a comment or shoot me an ask!—but i'll try not to lean too heavily on things without citing them.

what are matroids?

matroids are a kind of finite geometrical object. they capture some geometrical information about a finite set of points, namely which of them lie together on lines, or on planes, or cetera. maybe these points are situated in some ambient space, but maybe not; this data can be taken down without making reference to that space. in this way, matroids are able to extract just the geometry of those points and nothing else, and this makes them extremely versatile objects that crop up all over the place in mathematics. and this is saying nothing of just how highly structured and rich in interesting data they are!

in 1935, hassler whitney defined matroids in order to study the linear independence of vectors in vector spaces. since then they have outgrown linear algebra to infect graph theory and projective geometry, dominate combinatorial optimization, fascinate algebraic geometers, confound enumerationists and logicians, and inspire computer scientists to study the greedy algorithm. they are a nexus at which many radically different kinds of mathematics intersect, and there are many ways to study them.

okay, that's enough motivation. let's get to it!

"It is a fact people are discriminated against for being HIV positive. It is a fact the majority of the Nazi industrialists retained their wealth after war. It is a fact the night belongs to Michelob and Coke is real. It is a fact the color of your skin matters. It is a fact Crazy Eddie’s prices are insane. It is a fact that four colors red, black, green and white placed next to each other in any form are strictly forbidden by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in SoHo, will not precipitate a similar reaction.
From the first moment of encounter, the four colour canvases in this room will “speak” to everyone. Some will define them as an exercise in color theory, or some sort of abstraction. Some as four boring rectangular canvases hanging on the wall. Now that you’ve read this text, I hope for a different message."

Félix González-Torres (1957–1996) is described by his foundation's linked biographer as "one of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s," as his work "resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political."

One of his most well-known installation pieces is "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), which is a pile of candy weighing 175 pounds and was first exhibited in his gallery in 1991, the year his partner Ross Laycock died of AIDS-related complications.

A full gallery of the artist's work can be viewed on his foundation's page.

Regarding the specific piece above, it should be repeated that Forbidden Colors was originally produced/exhibited in 1988.

Free Palestine. 🇵🇸